The Mountebank Part 39

"I'm under no obligation to tell you why I've come to Royat. Let us say my liver's out of order."

"Then my dear," said I, "you have come to the wrong place to cure it."

She glanced at me wrathfully, took out a cigarette, waved away with an unfriendly gesture the briquette I had drawn from my pocket, and struck one of her own matches. There fell a silence, during which I sat back in my chair, my arms on the elbow and my fingers' tips joined together, and a.s.sumed an air of philosophic meditation.

Presently she said: "There are times, Tony, when I should like to kill you."

"I am glad," said I, "to note the resumption of human relations."

"You are always so pragmatically and priggishly correct," she said.

"My dear," said I, "if you want me to sympathize with you in this impossible situation, I'll do it with all my heart. But don't round on me for either bringing it about or not preventing it."

"I was anxious to know something about Andrew Lackaday--I don't care whether you think me a fool or not"--she was still angry and defiant--"I wrote you pointedly. You did not answer my letter. I wrote again reminding you of your lack of courtesy. You replied like a pretty fellow in a morning coat at the Foreign Office and urbanely ignored my point."

She puffed indignantly. The terrace began to be deserted. There was a gap of half a dozen tables between us and the next group. The flamboyant Algerian removed the coffee cups. When we were alone again, I reiterated my explanation. At every stage of my knowledge I was held in the bond of secrecy. Lackaday's sensitive soul dreaded, more than all the concentrated high-explosive bombardment of the whole of the late German Army, the possibility of Lady Auriol knowing him as the second-rate music-hall artist.

"You are the woman of his dreams," said I. "You're an unapproachable star in mid ether, or whatever fanciful lover's image you like to credit him with. The only thing for his salvation was to make a clean cut. Don't you see?"

"That's all very pretty," said Auriol. "But what about me? A clean cut you call it? A man cuts a woman in half and goes off to his own life and thinks he has committed an act of heroic self-sacrifice!"

I put my hand on hers. "My dear child," said I, "if Andrew Lackaday thought you were eating out your heart for him he would be the most flabbergasted creature in the world."

She bent her capable eyes on me. "That's a bit dogmatic, isn't it? May I ask if you have any warrant for what you're saying?"

"In his own handwriting."

I gave a brief account of the ma.n.u.script.

"Where is it?" she asked eagerly.

"In my safe in London--I'm sorry----"

In indignation she flashed: "I wouldn't read a word of it."

"Of course not," said I. "Nor would I put it into your hands without Lackaday's consent. Anyhow, that's my authority and warrant."

She threw the stub of her cigarette across the terrace and went back to the original cry:

"Oh Tony, if you had only given me some kind of notion!"

"I've tried to prove to you that I couldn't."

"I suppose not," she admitted wearily.

"Men have their standards. Forgive me if I've been unreasonable."

When a woman employs her last weapon, her confession of unreason, and demands forgiveness, what can a man do but proclaim himself the worm that he is? We went through a pretty scene of reconciliation.

"And now," said I, "what did Lackaday, in terms of plain fact, tell you down there?"

She told me. Apparently he had given her a precis of his life's history amazingly on the lines of a concentrated military despatch.

"Lady Auriol," said he, as soon as they were out of earshot, "you are here by some extraordinary coincidence. In a few hours you will be bound to hear all about me which I desired you never to know. It is best that I should tell you myself, at once."

It was extraordinary what she had learned from him in those few minutes.

He had gone on remorselessly, in his staccato manner, as if addressing a parade, which I knew so well, putting before her the dry yet vital facts of his existence.

"I knew there was a woman--wife and children--what does it matter? I told you," she said. "But--oh G.o.d!" She smote her hands together hopelessly, fist into palm. "I never dreamed of anything like this."

"I am in a position to give you chapter and verse for it all," said I.

"Oh I know," she said, dejectedly, and the vivid flower that was Auriol, in a mood of dejection, suggested nothing more in the world than a drought-withered hybiscus--her colour had faded, the sweeping fulness of her drooped, her twenties caught the threatening facial lines of her forties--what can I say more? The wilting of a tropical bloom--that was her att.i.tude--the sap and the life all gone.

"Oh I know. There's nothing vulgar about it. It goes back into the years.

But still ..."

"Yes, yes, my dear," said I, quickly. "I understand."

We were alone now on the terrace. Far away, a waiter hung over the bal.u.s.trade, listening to the band playing in the Park below. But for the noise of the music, all was still on the breathless August air. Presently she drew her palms over her face.

"I'm dog-tired."

"That abominable night journey," said I, sympathetically.

"I sat on a _strapontin_ in the corridor, all night," she said.

"But, my dear, what madness!" I cried horrified, although in the war she had performed journeys compared with which this would be the luxury of travel. "Why didn't you book a _coupe-lit_, even a seat, beforehand?"

She smiled dismally. "I only made up my mind yesterday morning. I got it into my head that you knew everything there was to be known about Andrew Lackaday."

"But how did you get it?"

My question was one of amazement. No man had more out-rivalled an oyster in incommunicativeness.

It appeared that I suffered from the defects of my qualities. I had been over-diplomatic. My innocence had been too bland for my worldly years. My evasions had proclaimed me suspect. My criticism of Royat made my fear of a chance visit from her so obvious. My polite hope that I should see her in Paris on my way back, rubbed in it. If there had been no bogies about, and Royat had been the Golgotha of my picture, would not my well-known selfishness, when I heard she was at a loose end in August Paris, have summoned her with a "Do for Heaven's sake come and save me from these selected candidates for burial?" I had done it before, in a.n.a.logous circ.u.mstances, I at Nauheim, she at Nuremberg. No. It was, on the contrary: "For Heaven's sake don't come near me. I'll see you in Paris if by misfortune you happen to be there."

"My dear," said I, "didn't it occur to you that your astuteness might be overreaching itself and that you might find me here--well--in the not infrequent position of a bachelor man who desires to withdraw himself from the scrutiny of his acquaintance?"

She broke into disconcerting laughter.

"You? Tony?"

"Hang it all!" I cried angrily, "I'm not eighty yet!"

However virtuous a man may be, he resents the contemptuous denial to his claim to be a potential libertine.

She laughed again; then sobered down and spoke soothingly to me. Perhaps she did me injustice, but such a thing had never entered her mind engaged as it was with puzzlement over Lackaday. When people are afflicted with fixed ideas, they grow perhaps telepathic. Otherwise she could not account for her certainty that I could give her some information. She knew that I would not write. What was a flying visit--a night's journey to Royat? In her wander years, she had travelled twelve hours to a place and twelve back in order to buy a cabbage. Her raid on me was nothing so wonderful.